A way to get into Offline if you're shy or inexperienced. Reduce risk and make selling easier.
NOTE: Read through to about half way down for the Offline part of this method
I thought I'd share a method I've used here in Australia to make it a relatively easy sell to get local businesses making regular payments. I won't give you too much of an intro, I'll just dive right into the exact steps I took.
1. Choose a town, ideally close enough to visit, that is a favorite tourism destination. This works best if you choose a location you regularly holiday at yourself.
2. Join an accommodation booking affiliate program, e.g. Accommodation holiday house rentals- TakeABreak
3. Join a tour booking affiliate program, e.g. Australian Tour Search • Tours To Go
4. Register a country specific TLD with the town name in it. If you can get a domain with extra keywords, great, but if not as long as it has the town name it will work for you.
5. Setup web hosting in your own country.
6. Install WordPress and install all the typical plugins etc.
7. Install a link cloaking plugin that will allow you to track clicks, such as MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate links for example.
8. Set your permalinks to read with your category names then post names.
9. Setup categories for "accommodation" and "tours"
10. Setup subcategories for all the various types of accommodation and tours, e.g. resort, hotel, motel, eco tours, shopping tours etc. Draw these from the categories within each of your affiliate programs.
11. Publish every accommodation establishment and tour you can find from your affiliate programs as a post on your site. Include at minimum an image and a brief description.
Ideally add as much info as possible. Unique content is best, but if you're pressed for time copy and paste from the affiliate network will usually work fine as well.
12. Start gathering as much information as you possibly can about the region. Compile it and start posting tourist information on your site regularly. Remember to use All-in-one SEO to add keyword rich meta data.
Topics like "Getting to ______", "Upcoming events in _____", "The history of ______", "Things to do in _____" all work great. Keep on updating the site as often as you can, or at least until you get decent SE traffic.
13. PROFIT!!
Tour and accommodation affiliate programs pay GREAT.
As you start to build traffic you'll often get sales like a family of 4 booking at a five star hotel and then grabbing a 2 day tour. So your percentage often comes out of three or four figure sales. It's relatively easy to generate very decent revenue and this is typically paid directly into your bank account.
HELPFUL EXTRAS
1. Create and use subcategories covering specific features such as "Pet friendly", "Budget" and so on.
2. Choose a theme that has drop down menus so can have all your subcategories displayed at a glance.
3. Visit the town and take high resolution photos. Rename them all with keyword rich names and add them to your articles with keyword rich alt tags, captions, descriptions. This will give you an extra boost of traffic from Google Images.
4. Add a review section and post reviews of various cafes, restaurants, activities and so on in town. The more location specific content you can post the better.
5. Build local, state and nation specific backlinks from locations such as local directories, local blogs etc.
OKAY, SO WHAT ABOUT THE OFFLINE BIT?
It might seem like all the above is a lot of work, but in reality it's something you can setup in a day and then populate gradually over a week or two.
Once you start to get traffic and commissions you have three brilliant things:
1. Ongoing revenue regardless of what happens from that point on
2. The attention of a great segment of local tourism web traffic.
3. Cold hard proof that you can generate sales for local tourism business.
From here you are in a fantastic position to sell advertising in various forms to local tourism business.
Even if a business owner hasn't got the first clue what the relevance of your number of unique visitors is, it doesn't matter.
They'll sure as hell understand the relevance of the $CASH figure in sales you've generated for their competitors!
Prepare a dossier showing:
This is the kind of information that makes businesses mouths water. All you need to do is get this in front of people and get an opportunity to talk to them about what you do.
We've found the easiest way to do this is through visiting the town in question and just getting into natural conversations with people. Any tourism operator will typically ask you the same questions:
"So where are you from? And what do you do?"
To which you can answer, "Well now that you ask...."
But of course you can use whatever canvassing methods you prefer. You also need to play it by ear a little depending on the local culture. People have different ways of responding to service offers so you don't want to get anyone's back up.
Once you get the interest of a business owner there is a plethora of advertising options you can offer them:
The beauty of this approach is you can really leverage your IM experience and use it as a springboard into offline marketing.
And it also helps you with the nerves factor of dealing with people, because the fact you already have revenue means you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Packing cold hard data also helps you with your confidence as you have something real to show.
PLUS, when you nail this approach your holidays can be paid for and you can make great money from visiting beautiful spots. WIN!
I thought I'd share a method I've used here in Australia to make it a relatively easy sell to get local businesses making regular payments. I won't give you too much of an intro, I'll just dive right into the exact steps I took.
1. Choose a town, ideally close enough to visit, that is a favorite tourism destination. This works best if you choose a location you regularly holiday at yourself.
2. Join an accommodation booking affiliate program, e.g. Accommodation holiday house rentals- TakeABreak
3. Join a tour booking affiliate program, e.g. Australian Tour Search • Tours To Go
4. Register a country specific TLD with the town name in it. If you can get a domain with extra keywords, great, but if not as long as it has the town name it will work for you.
5. Setup web hosting in your own country.
6. Install WordPress and install all the typical plugins etc.
7. Install a link cloaking plugin that will allow you to track clicks, such as MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate links for example.
8. Set your permalinks to read with your category names then post names.
9. Setup categories for "accommodation" and "tours"
10. Setup subcategories for all the various types of accommodation and tours, e.g. resort, hotel, motel, eco tours, shopping tours etc. Draw these from the categories within each of your affiliate programs.
11. Publish every accommodation establishment and tour you can find from your affiliate programs as a post on your site. Include at minimum an image and a brief description.
Ideally add as much info as possible. Unique content is best, but if you're pressed for time copy and paste from the affiliate network will usually work fine as well.
12. Start gathering as much information as you possibly can about the region. Compile it and start posting tourist information on your site regularly. Remember to use All-in-one SEO to add keyword rich meta data.
Topics like "Getting to ______", "Upcoming events in _____", "The history of ______", "Things to do in _____" all work great. Keep on updating the site as often as you can, or at least until you get decent SE traffic.
13. PROFIT!!
Tour and accommodation affiliate programs pay GREAT.
As you start to build traffic you'll often get sales like a family of 4 booking at a five star hotel and then grabbing a 2 day tour. So your percentage often comes out of three or four figure sales. It's relatively easy to generate very decent revenue and this is typically paid directly into your bank account.
HELPFUL EXTRAS
1. Create and use subcategories covering specific features such as "Pet friendly", "Budget" and so on.
2. Choose a theme that has drop down menus so can have all your subcategories displayed at a glance.
3. Visit the town and take high resolution photos. Rename them all with keyword rich names and add them to your articles with keyword rich alt tags, captions, descriptions. This will give you an extra boost of traffic from Google Images.
4. Add a review section and post reviews of various cafes, restaurants, activities and so on in town. The more location specific content you can post the better.
5. Build local, state and nation specific backlinks from locations such as local directories, local blogs etc.
OKAY, SO WHAT ABOUT THE OFFLINE BIT?
It might seem like all the above is a lot of work, but in reality it's something you can setup in a day and then populate gradually over a week or two.
Once you start to get traffic and commissions you have three brilliant things:
1. Ongoing revenue regardless of what happens from that point on
2. The attention of a great segment of local tourism web traffic.
3. Cold hard proof that you can generate sales for local tourism business.
From here you are in a fantastic position to sell advertising in various forms to local tourism business.
Even if a business owner hasn't got the first clue what the relevance of your number of unique visitors is, it doesn't matter.
They'll sure as hell understand the relevance of the $CASH figure in sales you've generated for their competitors!
Prepare a dossier showing:
- How many visitors you get to your site every month (ppl love bigger numbers)
- Where those people come from (showing you can reach international customers as well as locals)
- How many views you get of your promotional (affiliate) posts
- How many leads (clickthroughs) you generate for local business
- How much revenue you generate both overall, and for your leading promotions.
This is the kind of information that makes businesses mouths water. All you need to do is get this in front of people and get an opportunity to talk to them about what you do.
We've found the easiest way to do this is through visiting the town in question and just getting into natural conversations with people. Any tourism operator will typically ask you the same questions:
"So where are you from? And what do you do?"
To which you can answer, "Well now that you ask...."
But of course you can use whatever canvassing methods you prefer. You also need to play it by ear a little depending on the local culture. People have different ways of responding to service offers so you don't want to get anyone's back up.
Once you get the interest of a business owner there is a plethora of advertising options you can offer them:
- Go to someone you're promoting via affiliate program and offer them direct promotion. Usually cheaper for them and better for you.
- Offer banner advertisements in prime locations on your site. I've had clients paying $1 per click which adds up very quickly. You can offer PPC (tracked through your link cloaking plugin) or a monthly rate.
- Offer advertorials - write an editorial on the business and set it as a sticky post on your site.
- Anything else that naturally evolves through your conversations with the business. Get creative. If someone wants a giant full color page dedicated to them or a heavy banner ad presence or a series of articles and they're willing to pay for it, then do it!
The beauty of this approach is you can really leverage your IM experience and use it as a springboard into offline marketing.
And it also helps you with the nerves factor of dealing with people, because the fact you already have revenue means you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Packing cold hard data also helps you with your confidence as you have something real to show.
PLUS, when you nail this approach your holidays can be paid for and you can make great money from visiting beautiful spots. WIN!
Boston Florists
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